The History Of Video Game Fads From Pong To Fortnite

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The video game industry is not one where originality reigns supreme. Sure, there are definitely Big Ideas that change the landscape of gaming, but for the most part publishers are content to slowly improve on stuff that’s already proven profitable. Think about how many open-world action games you’ve played in the last few years where capturing towers opens up new missions on your mini-map to let you capture more towers ad infinitum, or twin stick shooters, or Dark Souls-alikes?

But sometimes imitation goes beyond mere flattery to become a fad, when seemingly the entire video game world gets fixated on a single idea and starts churning out endless copies. We’re seeing it now with Fortnite and the Battle Royale craze, but this isn’t a new thing. Let’s blow in the cartridges and revisit some of the most potent fads in video game history.

Pong

Nolan Bushnell’s ultra-simple electronic tennis game wasn’t anything new, but it served as the tipping point for arcade games as a whole. The concept of Pong was actually first seen in Magnavox’s Odyssey home system in 1972, but Bushnell’s coin-operated variant created an industry. In 1975, Atari released their own home version, and the floodgates were opened. Because you can’t copyright gameplay, just about every home electronics company in the world made their own version, from Zanussi’s Ping-O-Tronic to the Coleco Telstar. Many of these machines sold in the millions, but it wasn’t long before people got tired of Pong and wanted to move on to more complex games.

Fighting Games

For the first few decades of arcade gaming, owners had a pretty significant problem: when people got really good at the games, they could monopolize them for hours on a single quarter and drive profits down. But with Capcom’s release of Street Fighter II in 1987, the whole paradigm changed. The addition of a competitive two-player mode, where the winner stayed on the machine while the loser lost their quarter, kickstarted profits in a big way while letting gamers really determine their dominance. It was a huge success, and for the next five years or so fighting games turned into the hottest property around. Mortal Kombat spawned a host of blood-soaked imitators, SNK’s Neo-Geo arcade system boasted dozens of brawlers, while Sega’s Virtua Fighter pushed the genre into 3D. Combine that with Capcom pushing out a revision of Street Fighter every year and that oversaturation quickly killed the market, sending fighting games into a decade-long lull.

Tetris-Alikes

The runaway success of Russian-born puzzle game Tetris not only made Nintendo’s Game Boy the must-have portable system of the late 1980s, it also reshaped the world of video gaming. After its release, not only did we see dozens of falling block line-completing puzzles, but many other games using the same general gravity and overflowing playfield mechanism. In addition to official sequels like the bizarre Hatris, games like Columns and Puyo Puyo carved out niches for themselves. This genre is still going today, but it’s significantly diminished from its early 90s heyday.

Mascot Platformers

Nintendo did something truly amazing with Super Mario Bros. by fusing fast-paced arcade action with a sense of exploration and narrative. But it was Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog that truly ushered in the era of mascot platformers. After the little blue speedster became a cultural icon, just about every video game company around pumped out their own side-scrolling hop and bop title with an anthropomorphic animal protagonist. We’re talking about Bubsy, Gex, Bonk, Aero The Acro-Bat and dozens more. These games are still made, mostly targeted at a younger audience, but not in the sheer density of their 90s heyday.

First Person Shooters

Not all fads completely disappear after their heyday, and this is a fine example. Obviously FPS games are still one of the biggest segments of the PC market. But after the insane success of Doom, it suddenly seemed like everybody and their brother had a first-person shooter on the shelves. In 1994, at least 25 first-person shooters were released. That number doubled in 1995, as classics like Descent and Marathon were joined by games as ridiculous as Chex Quest and William Shatner’s TekWar. The FPS craze calmed down after a few years, but a casual visit to Steam will show you that people are still pumping out low-effort shooters to this day.

Music Games

It’s easy to forget that at one time Rock Band was the absolute biggest thing in gaming. There have been beat-matching and music games for a long time, but Guitar Hero‘s introduction of a dedicated plastic guitar peripheral in 2005 changed everything. Being able to roughly simulate the action of shredding added a new layer to the experience that was quickly imitated and duplicated. Rock Band added drums, keyboards and singing to the mix and soon every gaming household in America had at least one set of “instruments” in their home. As quickly as the wave crested, though, it broke – the market was full to bursting and people didn’t want to trade up for new peripherals for a new generation of consoles. Throw in a global recession and the music game fad petered out in 2009.

Farmville

If you’ve got relatives on Facebook, you probably remember the dark days of Farmville and its million slightly different knock-offs. Zynga capitalized on the social network to create an endlessly self-reinforcing web of favors and requests, as progress was very difficult beyond a certain point without asking friends for help or spending real money on FarmCoins. The runaway success of Farmville inspired dozens of developers to release clones of it seemingly on a daily basis. Even Zynga got in on the act with CityVille, FishVille, ad infinitum. “Clickers,” as they came to be called, embodied the absolute worst of casual gaming in their lack of skill and obsession with milking money from players.

Block Building

The success of Minecraft took the whole planet by surprise – a clunky, buggy Java sandbox game with deliberately lo-fi graphics somehow managed to become beloved by tweens all over the world for its depth and accessibility. It wasn’t long before the imitators stared coming hot and heavy. Some, like Roblox, managed to carve out a niche by expanding feature sets and taking a different but still simple visual approach. But dozens of others just Xeroxed everything and tried to grab a slice of the pie – games like Mineblock, Cubescape, UberBlox et al flooded the market for a few years. This is one fad that’s still grinding on, although a little slower than its peak, due to the continued popularity of the original.

Flappy Bird

A game doesn’t necessarily have to be good to be ripped off, as the success of Flappy Bird ably illustrates. The primitive action game developed by Vietnamese coder Dong Nguyen wasn’t anything new, but something about its ridiculous difficulty struck a nerve and soon after he pulled it, the App Store was flooded with literally hundreds of imitations, replacing the iconic wall-eyed bird with bugs, planes, cats, dogs, ghosts, celebrities… you name it. It didn’t matter that none of these rip-offs captured a tiny fraction of the success of the original, but thankfully after less than a year this one sputtered out.

Battle Royale

Some fads only happen because technology has caught up with a designer’s dreams enough to make them possible. Take the server tech that allows PlayerUnknown’s Battlegroundsto host 100 people in a single fast-paced game instance with minimal lag. It’s that density that made it and games like Fortnite huge, combined with the “one shot and you’re out” tension and shrinking play area of the Battle Royale. But now that coders have figured out how to make it work, we’re in the middle of the BR boom, as new studios and existing properties alike are jumping on the copycat train. If there’s anything to learn from the rest of this article, it’s that Battle Royale is a fad just like any other, and we can expect it to fizzle out in a year or two as we move on to something else.